


Silence and space

by IndulgentDiscourse



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Happy halloween, Horror, Pre-Canon, Suspense, sailors and astronauts alike are superstitious fucks and guess which guy is both of those things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 04:25:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16468697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndulgentDiscourse/pseuds/IndulgentDiscourse
Summary: Those who wish to become a captain of the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration must go through many rigorous trials and tests to determine how well they hold up under pressure in a spacefaring life. One such test is known as “Dark Week”. Can Davenport succeed on the last obstacle to his life’s goal, even as the unknown presses in on him?





	Silence and space

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I wanted to write a spooky story for Halloween, and I wanted to try my hand at writing a suspense, which I’ve never done before, so please be gentle if it’s not that good. Tbh I kinda lost it near the end but we’ll see! Please comment and let me know what y’all think! Love you!

In training for captainship in the I.P.R.E., there were many tests and much training that Lieutenants had to go through. Some of it ranged from physicals to academics to sensitivity training, but the one test that many feared was simply called “Dark Week”.

 

Dark Week was mandatory training for all incoming captains, especially those who wished to make a career out of space and interplanar travel. The purpose was simple: a captain needed to keep their cool at all times, and be able to handle extended periods of time alone while traveling, in case of a worst-case scenario. The objective: to make it through a week, alone in a small station kept in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. The successful completion of Dark Week was essential to someone receiving their captainship, especially if they wanted to go into the space and interplanar division. If they failed, they may just be reassigned to a captain’s position on the ground, or even held in their current rank.

 

For Lieutenant Drew Davenport, failure was not an option. He was determined to make it into the higher ranks of the I.P.R.E., to become a captain of his own ship and crew. His life goal was to swim among the stars, to reach for the unknown, and tame the unseen universe. His success hinged upon completing the infamous Dark Week.

 

There were many stories told amongst the ranks of the I.P.R.E. about the test. Some said that the time alone rotted the minds of some of the most brilliant people the Institute had ever seen, others whispered tales of horrid creatures lurking unseen beyond portholes and stealing the life away from unsuspecting cosmonauts.

 

Davenport, ever the practical gnome, paid the stories no mind. Sailors and astronauts alike were superstitious folks, and superstitions had no real affect on the tangible reality that made up his world.

 

Nevertheless, the day of Davenport’s launch, he found himself participating in several traditions that made no sense to him except to keep the eyes of his coworkers off his back.

 

First, he awoke to a meal of steak and eggs outside his door, already prepared, with a note from his CO. Never one to turn down an opportunity to either not cook or be forced to stomach the food from the mess hall, he eagerly ate.

 

Then, on his way towards the building where he would get ready for his launch to the station, an engineer halted him in his tracks. Davenport recognized the man from the engineering department; he was a good man and an incredibly talented scientist. Davenport already had his eye on the man if he was to ever gain command of his own crew, despite the man’s insistence on skipping part of the dress code.

 

Davenport glanced up from where denim-covered legs to the kindly face of Engineer Hallwinter. The poor man was panting, almost as if he had run to catch up with Davenport.

 

“Apologies, Lieutenant,” he gasped, attempting to straighten himself up into attention. Davenport waved him off, and Hallwinter sighed with relief. “The other engineers wanted me to give you this,” he said, and offered Davenport a stuffed cat. Davenport took it, but not without a raised eyebrow. Hallwinter shrugged. “They said it was good luck, sir. Something about tradition.”

 

Davenport almost rolled his eyes. He knew the significance of the stuffed cat plenty well. After all, when he hadn’t been spending his time locked away in the engineering department of the Institute, he had been working on ships in the naval exploration department. Sailors were almost as bad as astronauts, to be honest. They kept cats on board to keep away mice, and despite the fact that every single person on the ship had been a scientist or arcanist in some way, they still watched the ship’s cat for clues on the weather to come.

 

Nonetheless, Davenport tucked the stuffed cat close to his chest. “Thank you,” he said, giving Hallwinter a grateful smile. “I’ll be sure to keep the engineers in mind while I’m up there.”

 

Sensing the dismissal, Hallwinter gave him one last friendly wave and made his way back across the quad towards the laboratory, and Davenport headed on towards the control center. It was hectic inside, and the windows facing the launchpad were covered in dark curtains. It was considered bad luck for the crew in the control center to see the shuttle before it took off, but there was work to be done still, so curtains it was. Davenport made his way over towards his Captain, tail waving excitedly. He was so close to space, he could practically taste it. Dark Week was the first time that most incoming explorers went into the stars, and Davenport was no exception.

 

“Lieutenant! Are you ready?”

 

Davenport saluted. “Yes sir, just point me where to go!”

 

From there, he was directed into a series of rooms where last-minute physicals were conducted, a list of all items inside the ship were given to him for inspection, and final ground rules were went over.

 

“You’ll only have use of the comm system in case of an emergency,” his Captain explained. “This is to see how well you can handle spacefaring alone, in cases of dire emergency. You’ll receive no help from the Institute unless it’s life or death.” Davenport stood at rapid attention. He couldn’t afford to fail.

 

Soon, he was given an enchanted robe, designed to repel the pressures of the atmosphere and led to a pod out on the tarmac. The pod was the shuttle that would take him to the station where he would spend his week, and soon he was strapped in and ready for takeoff. He carefully set the stuffed cat on the dashboard of the pod. The glass eyes glinted in the sunlight at him like winking.

 

“Well,” he told it, “this is it. One last test, and then I’ll be a captain.” Naturally, the cat said nothing.

 

The comm in the headrest buzzed, and he jumped. “Lieutenant Davenport, are you ready for takeoff?”

 

“Affirmative.”

 

“This countdown will be the last communication you will have with the Institute until the completion of this test. On your mark.”

 

Davenport raised his chin. “Three,” he said, surprising himself with how steady his voice was.

 

“Two,” said the control center. “One.”

 

The pod lurched as a combination of a rocket in the base as well as several spellcasters lifted the shuttle into the sky. Davenport’s stomach lurched, but he said nothing, only gritting his teeth as he rose higher and higher. Soon, he could only see the outlines of farmlands and a gray smudge that was the campus of the I.P.R.E.. Soon after that, it was just clouds. It was steadily getting darker, with only the thrum of the rocket in the base to provide sound to an otherwise silent vacuum. On the dashboard, the stuffed cat did its job and began to float, telling him that he was in zero gravity. It spun from side to side and upside down, and Davenport couldn’t help but reach a finger out to correct it back to right side up.

 

A light pulsed on the console in front of him, alerting him that contact and subsequent attachment to the station was imminent.

 

He pressed all the necessary buttons and flipped the correct switches, and soon the pod shuddered, his signal that it connected with the station. Eventually, a light turned from green to red, and with a hiss, a panel behind him slid open. Pushing the still-floating cat through into the airlock, Davenport unbuckled himself and pushed himself backwards into the airlock. Zero gravity was a curious sensation, and he enjoyed the feeling of flipping through the air effortlessly, though his body didn’t quite always know how to react, his tail pinwheeling uselessly as his body fought to correct its balance.

 

Davenport check that everything was in order before hitting the button to shut the panel to the pod. It shut, locking him in the first airlock. Another button, and another panel opened to allow him to float into the second airlock, where the pressure could equalize, allowing him a full gravity home for the next week, much like the exploratory vessels the Institute used. The stuffed cat fell to the ground, alerting him that the gravity was back to normal. He made his way to the bridge and went through the rounds of checking on air pressure and fuel capacity and other basics drilled into him from training. Then he check the food stores, the manifesto, and the timer set into the wall that alerted him of how much time he had left on his challenge. Finally, he began to tour the station. Directly adjacent to the bridge was the kitchen, with a small stove, refrigerator, microwave, and sink. A dish rack was set into the wall, with barred cabinets to prevent the dishes from falling. A small common area with a couch set into the wall was behind the kitchen. A small table was bolted to the floor in front of the couch. The top of the table opened up to reveal a deck playing cards, and a box of movies and music discs. Across from the couch was a screen and a sound system, once again set into the wall.

 

There was a hall, leading from the bridge towards the rest of the station. It housed additional comm units that all couldn’t fit in the bridge that would probably be used by the crew, if this station had any. It also was the hall where the air locks and only entrance to the station was. He had walked in this hall in order to get to the bridge, and had to walk down it again to get to the rest of the living quarters. It was housed by one long strip of lighting that flickered once when he walked under it. Davenport frowned, and tried not to think too much about it.

 

Still holding the stuffed cat, Davenport wandered towards the main quarters at the end of the long hall. The room he would be staying in was the size of regulation captain’s quarters. It was bare bones, to say the least, but it was bigger than the gnome was used to.

 

The bed was situated perpendicular to the door, with one large porthole window by the head and another by the foot of the bed. In the corner diagonal to the bed was a wardrobe, and in the opposite side of the room was a dresser with a mirror above it. The window above the top of the bed was reflected in the mirror. A small nightstand and lamp were situated near the top of the bed as well.

 

To right of the bedroom was a bathroom, to the left a room for working out. He gave the exercise equipment a quick glance, but it didn’t hold his interest as the equipment was sized for the larger races. He tried not to think too hard about that, though his ears drooped dispiritedly.

 

Davenport returned to his room and hopped up on the bed. He had a long week to go, and he knew that his superiors were watching him, assessing his every move. He knew that some above him were waiting for him to fail. That could not happen. Failure was not an option for Drew Davenport. He looked at the stuffed cat, still in his grasp. He carefully set it on the nightstand, maneuvering it into a sitting position. He traced a finger over its silky fur.

 

“You believe in me,” he said, smiling fondly at it. “Maybe the engineers were on to something. You’re a good listener.” The cat didn’t respond in any way. “What should I call you,” Davenport mused. “How about Ganan? It’s Gnomish for ‘ _silent_ ’,” he explained. Ganan said nothing.

 

Eventually, the clock in the kitchen read that it was a time far too late for Davenport to be awake. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, carefully gathering up his dishes from his dinner and dumping them in the sink. He left his game of solitaire on the table; he would finish it tomorrow.

 

He made his way back towards his room. For once, it was completely silent.

 

Davenport had never known complete silence. He grew up in a large warren filled with extended family, and immediately after that he went to the I.P.R.E. campus, which was a mix of a military base and a college campus. It was never silent, even at three in the morning.

 

It unsettled him.

 

He needed to make some noise, of any sort, and for a moment he considered whistling a tune as he made his way down the long hallway, but he stopped himself. Whistling was considered a bad idea on any sort of vessel, going all the way back to his days at sea. It was said that you could whistle up a storm. As silly as he thought superstitions were, he decided there was no harm in not risking anything. As he passed under the light in the long hall, it flickered once more.

 

As he lay in his too-large bed in his too-silent room, his mind turned to his seafaring days. He remembered being kept awake by his companions telling tales of creatures that lived in the dark of the deep sea, merfolk who would wreck ships at the slightest provocation and sirens who would lure you to you death with an enchanting song. Creatures that came in the night to haunt dreams and steal the very breath from your lungs; creatures that lived on fear and darkness who would come from your dreams while you were beneath the waves and sink your ship so that they could feast on the drowning crew.

 

The silence in his ears grew too loud, ringing in the impossibly quiet room. Out of the corner of his eye, in the window, he swore he saw a dark shape move. He froze in place, heart beating halfway out of his chest.

 

When nothing else happened, he relaxed. He scolded himself for being so irrational. Those were tales told to scare new recruits, and the myths of the past were explained by perfectly natural phenomenon. The merfolk were water genasi, the sirens bands of kenku pirates. Giant squids existed and were common knowledge! There were no stories of monsters in space, and the Institute had enough research put together to conclude that if aliens did exist, they were in the other planes, not in their universe, and if they were, they were a very, very, very far ways away.

 

Still scolding himself, Davenport fell into an uneasy sleep, heavy-lidded eyes watching the reflection of the window in the mirror, just in case.

 

The next day came with bright daylight shining in from the windows and reflecting off the mirror above the dresser as the light from the rising twin suns filled the station. Davenport allowed himself to relax, rolling over in his bed to face Ganan, still propped in the sitting position that Davenport left it in. He almost wished the stuffed cat a good morning before he caught himself, feeling foolish about the whole thing. He quickly showered and dressed himself in the clothes that were hanging in the wardrobe in the corner of his room, feeling much better about himself now that he was in his familiar uniform.

 

From there, he made his rounds around the station. He popped his head into every room on the station, and when the light in the hall flickered once more, he made a note for himself to tell the command center to fix it when he returned.

 

As he made his way around the common area, the box of music discs caught his eye, and he sorted through until he found an album from an elvish performer his mother listened to when he was younger. He made himself breakfast after that, foot tapping to the beat of strumming guitars and a crooning voice.

 

As the day wore on, Davenport found himself growing more and more tired. Perhaps it was a side-effect of space travel. His body wasn’t used to being above the planet’s rotation, or perhaps all the stress leading up to getting him to this point. After all, this was the last test before his desired goal. All he had to do was treat it like a vacation, and he would be fine.

 

As Davenport pondered his recent fatigue, the music stopped, the voice fading away as the album ended. The music player slowly ejected the disc with a quiet, mechanical hiss, but Davenport was too lost in thought to notice.

 

All he knew when he came back to himself was that the silence was back.

 

Davenport was a man who valued his silence. He often sought the quiet after a long day at work, or even back when he was a child and his numerous siblings and cousins became too rowdy or loud for him to deal with.

 

But there was a difference between the silence that comes with an absence of people in your immediate vicinity, and a silence that was overpowering and overwhelming and wrong.

 

It was as if the vacuum of space had somehow gotten inside the station. It was silent, still, so quiet that the ringing in his ears seemed muted, muffled.

 

It seemed like the whole universe was holding its breath.

 

Somewhere in the station, there was a loud _BANG_.

 

It was so loud and present and overwhelming, a sudden end to the oppressive silence. It was so loud that Davenport’s ears and tail shot straight up without his own accord, so loud that he felt it rumble through the station floor and he felt it in his feet.

 

It scared the poor gnome so badly he jumped, almost falling off the couch from where he was sitting.

 

As Davenport sat, heart pounding, on the couch, he was overcome with a feeling of deep, primal dread. There was a window behind him, and every single instinct in his body screamed at him to not turn around, to not see whatever was certainly lurking out there in space. His breath seemed to catch twice, once deep in his belly, and then again up in his throat. He would have been panting had he not been struggling to bring air in. Every muscle seemed to be locked up in a deep terror, and he could not control them. Davenport pressed a shaky hand to his chest, and for a moment was concerned that his heart would quite literally beat out of his chest. Forcing in a deep breath, he made his shoulders relax. Taking in another, he counted down from three and forced himself to leap to his feet, turning to face the window as fast as he could.

 

Though there was nothing there, he was left with the impression that whatever had been there had just escaped him spying it, ducking away at the last minute.

 

Uneasily, he gathered himself up, and walked away from the common area. He made his way to the bridge, taking a seat and forcing himself to relax. He watched the clouds shift and swirl above the planet until his heart rate reduced to a normal speed and even then he sat there, watching until the two suns faded away to the opposite hemisphere and the lights of the giant cities on the planet below began to glow. On the surface, light pollution may have been a damned annoying thing to deal with, but from space, seeing the efforts of life and innovation and wonder filled him with a joy unlike any other he’d known.

 

Once he was calm enough, Davenport began to rationalize what that banging could have been. It came from inside the station, and there was nothing on the outside that it could have been. Even if an antenna had come loose or some space debris had hit the station, there was no sound in space. He might have felt it through the floor like he had, but that wouldn’t have accounted for the sound itself. Eventually, he wrote it off as the station settling, much like a house creaking.

 

Eventually, Davenport struggled to keep his eyes open from where he sat in the chair, so he made his way back to his room.

 

Although he didn’t see it, the light flickered, more violently this time.

 

Davenport slipped into bed, curling up into a tight ball. He faced away from the window, his eyes tightly closed.

 

He dreamed that night, though he wished he hadn’t.

 

He couldn’t recall much in the morning, only that what there had been was wrong and terrifying.

 

He recalled a dark shape, large and impenetrable and formidable. It lingered in the furthest reaches of space, in the darkest recesses of the universe, and when he finally confronted it, it loomed above him like a tsunami before crashing down on him and the station alike, breaking him apart to pieces, leaving nothing of Davenport behind but a pile of broken and tangled limbs and hearts that beat themselves to scattered ashes in the empty bodies of men left alone in a vast void.

 

He awoke, gasping for air, levering himself out of bed so fast that he tore the sheets from where they were tightly tucked under the mattress. Sweat clung to every inch of his skin, so he shed his nightclothes in a pile on the floor and padded to the shower.

 

He couldn’t relax, even as hot water cascaded down around him. Every light in the small bathroom was on, and for a moment he even considered going back to his room to see if the lamp was bolted to the nightstand or if it could be moved. Even with the extra lights on, the small shower seemed too dark, and he swore he would draw back the curtain to see the black mass from his nightmare in the bathroom with him.

 

He scolded himself for acting like a child who had just seen a horror movie they couldn’t handle. There was nothing out there, and he was working himself up over nothing. He needed to calm down. He had three more days left, he could handle three more days.

 

Dried off, Davenport went back to his room just as the first hints of sunlight began to peek into the room. He dressed in his uniform, and had half a mind to tell Ganan good morning, just to have someone to talk to.

 

To his shock, the stuffed cat was nowhere to be seen.

 

The next day and a half went by quietly, with Davenport taking refuge in the bridge. It was the only place his bizarre freakouts hadn’t happened.

 

Ganan was nowhere to be found. At first, Davenport thought he’d somehow knocked the toy to the ground at his speedy retreat from his bed and room, but the cat wasn’t tangled in the sheets, nor under any furniture, nor had it been kicked into the hallway. It wasn’t in any of the rooms on the station. Ganan had simply vanished.

 

Davenport tried to rationalize, once again. There were no robotic parts inside the cat, he would have felt them, so there was no way it was a prank gift from the engineers, designed to walk off electronically or something after a certain point. There was a possibility it was enchanted to a similar effect, but spells had a certain range that they worked in. Perhaps it wasn’t being actively controlled by a magic user, but a sort of “sleeper spell” had been placed upon it to teleport. Davenport had checked, opening drawers and cupboards and under furniture. No Ganan anywhere. It was as if it just never existed.

 

Davenport spent the rest of the days on the station in his chair on the bridge, watching the skies out the window or reading, and spent his nights in his room, stubbornly facing away from the window. He’d had no more nightmares since Ganan’s disappearance, but he was still on edge every night.

 

The last night he was to stay on the station, he had just gotten settled into bed when he realized he left the hall light on. He opened his door to see the light flickering violently. Scowling, he reached for the switch when with a loud _POP_ , the light burst, burnt out, scattering a few stray sparks.

 

He crossed his arms, frowning severely. His tail lashed from side to side, but his irritation soon faded. Standing in the doorway to his room, facing the long hall, he could see the bridge and out the large windows glowing in the faint light of the little lights and dials on the console. That was the only bit of light in the long, dark hallway.

 

The shadows played with his imagination, and he could have sworn that he saw the shadows in the hall twist and move. Quickly backing into his room, he slammed the door. He hardly slept that night, but when he did, it was bathed in the soft glow of his lamp.

 

A few hours after he had drifted off to sleep, he was awoken with another loud _BANG_ and a hissing sound. Jolting to his feet, Davenport carefully peeked around his door to see steam filling the hallway. A pipe jutted out, having obviously been burst.

 

The steam whirled around in the long hallway, obscuring previously visible corners. The shadows stretched impossibly long, seemingly never ending, limitless, almost as if they were no longer bound by the laws of nature that said they must obey where the light was coming from. The entire corridor was darkness and mist.

 

The whistling sound produced from the burst pipe was eerie enough after the complete silence of the vacuum, but now it was like a full assault on the senses. Davenport’s blood ran cold, freezing to ice in his veins. He could feel his ears trembling, both pressed completely flat to the side of his head. He needed to do something to fix this. He needed to flee, somehow.

 

The shadows loomed.

 

Davenport knew that something needed to be done. He was so close to his goal, just a half a day away. And so, for the first time that week, he spoke.

 

“Go away!”

 

It didn’t do much to stop the steam from pouring from the pipe, nor did the shadows stop shifting and coiling. In fact, it seemed to embolden them.

 

Davenport bit his tongue, and took a hesitant step forward. And another, and then another. The darkness enveloped him, much like it had done in his nightmare, and for a moment, he was so frightened that his eyes seemed to refuse to work properly and all he could see was his hand in front of his face. He eventually reached the middle of the hallway where the pipe was, which he only found by brushing his hands over the walls and feeling for it.

 

The sound reached a higher pitch and then that terror was back, almost dropping him to his knees. He couldn’t think, he could hardly move. Something was there, something was doing this to him, and he could do nothing about it.

 

A toolkit! There, he could barely see it in the darkness, but under one of the consoles for the air locks was a regulation toolkit. He scrambled for it, flinging it open and searching in it with a frantic panic until he found sealant and tape. Holding the tools in his hands, he made short work of patching up the burst pipe and taping it shut. Instantly, the noise was gone, and the silence was resumed. The shadows lingered, but the worst of the fear was gone.

 

“Go away! You don’t get to scare me anymore!” The lie hung on the tip of his tongue, but he felt better for saying it anyways.

 

He dug in the toolkit until he found all the flashlights and magic lights he could find, and put them on the consoles, illuminating the hallway in a dull glow.

 

Once that was done, he pulled himself into the chair on the bridge, tucking his knees up under his chin and curling his tail around himself. There he sat until the sun rose high above the horizon and the timer in the kitchen beeped. It was time to go.

 

He tiredly pulled on the enchanted robes for the shuttle journey back and waited for the shudder of the station that meant the pod had arrived and docked.

 

When he opened the first airlock, he stopped dead in surprise. There, sitting on the ground behind the sealed door of the airlock, propped exactly how Davenport had left him, was Ganan.

 

Davenport stared at the stuffed cat, its plasticky black fur gleaming like an oil slick in the low light. Ganan, of course, said nothing in return.

 

Davenport edged around the cat, stepped into the other airlock, and shut it, sealing the station away behind him.

 

From there, he began the long journey back to the Institute, back home. Three months later, he was given his well deserved captaincy.

 

A year later, he was given free reign to pick his own crew for a two month journey. He had already decided on some of the loudest individuals possible, just to ensure that he was never left alone in that silence again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Justin voice* HAUNTED DOLL WATCH anyways I have a head canon that Barry is just a magnet for haunted and possessed and cursed items even before he gets into necromancy and he doesn’t even know it. 
> 
> Sailors and astronauts have some weird and cool superstitions! You guys should look them up! 
> 
> One thing I tried to bring in in this neat thing called “infrasound” which is basically noise at levels that we can hear and be influenced by but we aren’t really aware of, there’s certain frequencies that people hear and they just get so scared out of nowhere it’s really cool and y’all should read up on it   
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound 
> 
> Thanks for reading it! Let me know what you thought! Happy Halloween!


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